hacker friendly

SCM for publishing / data managing ( not really a feature, but a design goal from the beginning )

blindly follows the KISS principle from code to UI: be a simple blog, no more no less

modular

By it's middleware nature, bamboo could be used with other hack middleware to achieve extensibility; Bamboo plugins are also middleware, so they can be used not only in bamboo, but any other CMS like web application.

This makes theme creation a relatively complex task, since a theme author basically has to do everything: from html construction to model manipulation. But since state is passed purely and return type is in IO, it also provides the ultimate safety and flexibility to theme construction, something unmatched by any main stream web frameworks. Integrating twitter? no problem, do them in IO.

Plugin

Plugin is a proper hack middleware, so it works on an upper layer of the blog engine. It has all the power of a middleware, i.e. intercept request and response, and also the limitation, e.g. no idea of the underlying data structure of the app.

Plugin can be used to to do customization on the env object, or transformation to the response body. An example plugin is syntax highlighting, which could be done in the core, but would be more lightweight ( in terms of architecture design ) to be separated into a plugin.

You are hence not limited to use just bamboo-plugins to customize your blog, any hack-middleware which suite your need will do.

Javascript / CSS

In db/config/theme, you can customize precisely which js / css files to use, this allows client side customization and also lightweight configuration without compilation.